Why San Diego Homeowners Add a SPAN Smart Panel During Solar, Battery, and EV Charger Installs

The best time to add a SPAN Smart Panel is the same day someone is already in your electrical panel. If you are adding solar, a Tesla Powerwall, an EV charger, or upgrading your service, the incremental cost of adding SPAN to that project is far lower than scheduling it as its own job later.

RCH Renewables is a SPAN Authorized Installer and C-10 licensed electrical contractor (#1108682). We currently have panels in stock. Here is what the product does, why it is different from everything else on the market, and when it makes sense to add it.

What SPAN actually does

SPAN replaces your standard electrical panel with a smart panel that gives you app-controlled circuit management, real-time energy monitoring down to the circuit level, and full integration with solar and battery systems.

A standard panel is a passive box. Power comes in, power goes out, and you have no idea which circuit is responsible for that spike in your electric bill. SPAN is an active energy management system that sees everything happening in your home in real time and acts on it automatically.

Practically, that means:

• You can see exactly which circuits are pulling power, updated in real time, in dollars instead of kilowatt hours you have to convert
• During a grid outage, you control which circuits get battery power and which get shed. From your phone. In real time. Not a decision you made on paper before you moved in.
• SPAN extends your battery backup by 40% by intelligently managing what draws from storage, based on a SPAN internal study of 1,200+ simulated outage scenarios
• If you have solar and a battery, SPAN routes excess solar into your EV automatically, saving up to $700 a year in California compared to charging off the grid
• Schedules run automatically: water heater and EV charger charge during solar production hours, not at peak SDG&E rates

The only panel that can skip your service upgrade

This is the part most people don't know. SPAN holds UL 3141 certification, a commercial-grade power control standard. No other smart panel on the market has it.

What that means practically: SPAN qualifies as an energy management system under NEC Article 220. When you pull a permit for an EV charger or a new appliance load, you list SPAN as the energy management system and you do not have to count that new load toward your service calculation. No utility call. No 3-to-9 month wait for the utility to upgrade your service. No $3,000 to $20,000 upgrade fee.

A study with PG&E data found that 98% of homes can run fully electrified (two EVs, heat pump, induction cooking, heat pump water heater) on 200 amps of service with SPAN managing the load. The average home's maximum concurrent draw is 88 amps. You do not need more service. You need smarter management of what you already have.

87% of SPAN installs have never triggered a PowerUp event at all. When it does happen, the average event lasts 5 to 8 minutes. Your EV charger throttles down temporarily and comes back up when there is headroom again. The homeowner never notices.

The person who built Powerwall founded SPAN

SPAN was founded in 2018 by Arch Rao, who spent five years at Tesla from 2013 to 2018 as Head of Products and Application Engineering for Tesla Energy. He led the teams that developed the original Powerwall and Powerwall 2.

The reason SPAN integrates with Tesla Powerwall better than anything else on the market is not a coincidence. The person who built Powerwall understood exactly what was missing in the electrical panel sitting next to it. So he went and built that.

SPAN has raised over $230 million in funding from Wellington Management, Wireframe Ventures, Capricorn, Munich Re Ventures, Fifth Wall, and the Amazon Alexa Fund. In April 2025, Eaton (one of the largest electrical equipment manufacturers in the world) made a $75 million equity investment and partnered with SPAN on co-branded panels. This is not a startup that might not be around in five years.

Control your home from anywhere

I have a client in Washington who travels constantly for work. He monitors his home's energy in real time from his phone: what's running, what the solar is producing, what the battery state of charge is. If something looks off, he can turn a circuit on or off remotely. He hasn't had to call me in months.

The same capability matters for property managers overseeing multiple homes or ADUs. SPAN shows energy by circuit, in dollars, which makes billing conversations with tenants straightforward. You can see what the ADU is drawing versus the main house in real time.

SPAN Drive: the EV charger that works with the panel

Most Level 2 EV chargers are binary: they are either running at full power or they are off. The SPAN Drive is different. It communicates directly with the SPAN panel via a dedicated RS-485 data connection and can throttle dynamically anywhere between 1 amp and 48 amps.

If you plug in your car and your air conditioning compressor comes on, your water heater kicks in, and your house is near its service limit, SPAN doesn't just shut off the charger. It drops it to 20 amps, gives your car a trickle charge, and brings it back to full speed the moment there is headroom again. The homeowner never knows it happened. The car is still charging.

SPAN Drive also has a charge-with-solar mode. Any excess solar production your home isn't using routes directly into your car instead of back to the utility at a fraction of the retail rate. In California, that mode saves up to $700 a year.

The SPAN Drive is $750 in hardware. It supports any EV with a J1772 connector and delivers up to 41 miles of range per hour. It is indoor and outdoor rated with a 20-foot cable.

When does SPAN make the most sense?

SPAN is worth considering any time you are already touching your electrical panel. Here are the five scenarios where we see it come up most often:

SPAN panel models available now

SPAN currently offers five panel models starting at $2,550 in hardware. Your installer will select the right one based on your home's service and how many circuits you need.

What does SPAN cost in San Diego?

SPAN panel hardware starts at $2,550 and runs to around $4,500 depending on the model. Installation adds labor, permits, and any associated electrical work.

Bundled with another project (solar, battery, EV charger, or panel upgrade) the incremental cost is typically in the $4,000 to $6,000 range above what you were already spending. As a standalone install with its own permit pull, site visit, and inspection, expect to pay more.

We will give you the exact number when we see your panel and scope the project. It is not a one-size answer.

Is SPAN right for every home?

No. If you have a straightforward panel, no solar, no battery, and no plans for either, SPAN is probably not the right call right now. It is a product that pays off when there is something to manage: solar production, battery storage, EV charging, or a combination of those.

If any of those apply, or if you are planning to add them in the next few years, the panel replacement moment is the cheapest time to get into SPAN. The panel is going in anyway. The cost difference is far smaller than doing it as a separate job later.